Time Management 101

For those of us who are gainfully employed, we all want to work awesome at our jobs. In order to get there we need to be able to juggle our time effectively. I’ve been working full-time for the better part of the last 30 years and have had a chance to take many Time Management courses. In this post I’d like to share with you a little of what I have learned about managing my time at work.

If you take any type of Time Management course there will be some discussion of four different types of issues that can take up your time. Let’s call them buckets.

Bucket 1 – Urgent and Important

This is the bucket associated with crisis management or firefighting. Any of you out there who work in a service-oriented department such as Information Technology can certainly relate to this bucket. I worked in IT for approximately 20 years so I feel your pain. I don’t miss those days but fighting fires was certainly the nature of that occupation.

Bucket 2 – Not Urgent but Important

This bucket might pertain to developing short or long-term goals. Maybe it would mean creating a development plan for yourself with your manager. I do this at the beginning of each year with my manager and we review it a few times over the year. Another example of what may fall under this bucket is taking classes related to your job and developing your professional skills. At home, maybe using a software application like Quicken to manage your money would fall under the heading of “Not Urgent but still Important”.

Bucket 3 – Urgent and Not Important

This bucket pertains to when we respond to a temporary sense of urgency or circumstances that feel urgent without being important. If you are in IT maybe someone is complaining about the speed of their computer. So you spend a whole morning trying to diagnose the problem but the issue is that the computer is old and should simply be upgraded to a faster CPU with more memory. This was a perceived sense of urgency but the end user was still able to do their job in a reasonable amount of time. If the proper course of action was taken no time would’ve been wasted.

Bucket 4 – Not Urgent and Not Important

This is the bucket that is associated with “waste”. This bucket is associated with pleasant but nonproductive choices. This is where we spend time doing unnecessary things like reading our personal email or reading blogs during the day. Yeah, like that happens…

Shift Your Time to Bucket 2

What we are really trying to do is to get away from the “reactive” situations and replace them with “proactive” activity. We want to give priority to Bucket 2 which is where the true opportunistic activity can occur. But how can we do this?

Avoid Bucket 4 Activity

This is a given. This is wasteful time that can be used constructively elsewhere.

Take from Bucket 3

Regain the time lost to the perception of urgency. Make sure the urgent activities are associated with Bucket 1 and are not deceptive urgency.

Commit to Planning

You must commit to planning on a daily/weekly basis.

Schedule your high priority tasks first, then fill in with the less important tasks. Dr. Stephen Covey called the high priority tasks the “Big Rocks”.

Learn to Say “No”

We all want to help people out at work but we have to learn to say “No” politely but firmly. Offer alternatives such as helping that person out when your “Big Rocks” are complete for the week. State your reasons for saying “No” so that there is a clear understanding of why you cannot help at that time.

Delegate If You Can

If at all possible, delegate some of your tasks to others. This could free up time that could be devoted to Bucket 2.

Realizing where your time goes on a daily basis in terms of the buckets laid out in this post is the first step in understanding time management. Learning how to shift your time strategically so that it is used in the best possible manner is the key to mastering time management.

I am a fellow cubicle dweller and have been working as a software professional for over 20 years. I have a passion site devoted to making your workspace a more organized, efficient, and happier place at Cubicle Bliss. You can check out my latest e-book which identifies some exceptional cubicle accessories which will help you upgrade your small work space to get it as organized and productive as possible!

Man, but this post makes me very, very happy to not be in that “infinitely interruptible” world that I recently left! Everything was in Bucket 1 all the time, and crisis management (other people’s crises) was the rule of every day.

I’ve written about this and done video posts, but it can’t be talked about enough. I like your breakdown and the whole “buckets” approach. It helps to have a picture in your head when organizing your time. Thanks for the great post.

Hi, everyone!
Really great post, but I don’t understand something from Bucket 4. Why reading blogs during the day is waste of time? It belongs to what kind of blog you are reading. I think if you read a blog like this one, you can find a lot of useful information, so what is the point of bucket 4?

OK I get your point and it is a good one. It is true that reading blogs that give good value is not a waste of time and I stand corrected! I am just glad that you feel that the information I wrote about was worthwhile…

I like the idea of the bucket approach. I am glad that I am spending most of my time at bucket 2 – bucket 1 sounds pretty stressful. Would be great to hear your ideas on how you can move from bucket 1 to bucket 2 – I guess spend less time in bucket 4 activities.

Hi Kell,
I certainly understand that the nature of someone’s job is dependent upon how much time is spent in each bucket. But if you could try to anticipate what the Urgent and Important items could be then you could possibly plan (Bucket 2) to avoid those. For example, if you are an IT manager and foresee a new implementation that is memory-intensive you could plan ahead and upgrade the memory for those computers. Instead of hearing about the slowness of the new application and having to answer those calls, you have already avoided them with the hardware upgrade.
Thanks very much for commenting.

Hi Omoba,
Thanks for the kind comments and please feel free to stop by my blog and comment as well. The guys at WorkAwesome are “awesome” to let us contribute to their fine blog. I am proud to add my $.02.

These are a pretty old set of categories, but you illustrated them really well. As I do more freelance work it becomes imperative to organise my time optimally, as there’s far less room for error working for yourself, I’ve found.

Hi,
As I mentioned at the top of the article, these are concepts I have learned over the years and I certainly don’t claim to have come up with them. I appreciate the comments on illustrating the categories as that was the main goal of the article so I guess I accomplished that 🙂
Organizing my time more effectively in the coming year is at the top of my resolution list but it is always at the top.
I’m not sure if you are referring to my website or WorkAwesome website, as to the design. If it is WorkAwesome I agree wholeheartedly! If you are referring to mine, thanks for the compliment.
Thanks so much for commenting!